Forget non-playable characters, upcoming life simulation inZOI is introducing co-playable characters. What are CPCs? After watching the official breakdown I'm still not really sure, but they're making use of Nvidia's AI generation tech to create more realistic, believable in-game characters. At least, that's the theory.
"Built with NVIDIA ACE, inZOI introduces Smart Zoi, Co-Playable Characters (CPC) that are more reactive and realistic than anything you’ve seen before," as explained in an Nvidia blog post. "Players will experience a comprehensive community simulation, where every ZOI in the city acts autonomously, driven by their life goals, and reacting to their environments and the events happening around them, leading to deeper levels of immersion and complex social situations."
The video above highlights situations like an empathetic character "purchasing" food for a hungry man, or an "appreciative" character helping hype up a street performer. These characters will reflect on their actions at the end of each day to shape a unique personality over time.
That all sounds neat, but is it an earth-shatteringly massive advancement on the personalities and preferences system that The Sims has had from the start? The most notable thing here is a plain language description of 'thoughts' that occur to a Smart Zoi that appears to be generated through a language model, but the video's not even clear on if that's the case or how that system works.
Nvidia's promise of the "profound impact of cutting-edge on-device [language model] technology" might be overstating it a bit. Or maybe I'm just cynical about it - but it's difficult not to be cynical about AI content generation when it's done little so far but make browsing the internet more annoying. In fairness, inZOI's AI-driven "3D print" feature is a fun little magic trick, but there's a lot of work to do in convincing an already AI-weary gaming community that the tech is actually adding something meaningful.
A whole new wave of life simulations are on the way, but here are some games like The Sims to keep you occupied in the meantime.
